Hi adventurers! Laurent aka “Kerohan” here, lead dev at Farworld Studio.
I want to explain, as transparently as possible, our philosophy for the future of Ascent Quest and answer some of the most common questions or concerns we receive. And there are two main questions; “When?” and “How?”.
So here’s a deep dive into our mindset for the development!
“What are you actually trying to create?”
Ascent Quest is not just a game.
We want it to be a long-term passion project that keeps living and evolving over time. It is not a project with fixed limits decided in advance.
We want Ascent Quest to be an evolving game that can still be around in many years.
Profitable or not, there will always be passionate people among us willing to keep working on it even during their free time and help it continue to grow.
Yes, we want to have a fun playable game as soon as possible. So even if we have to release a relatively small game at first, we plan to expand it through many content updates. When you have a long-term vision, it completely changes the way we develop it since we have to make all features easy to expand. This means that initial development also needs to create a strong base and therefore takes more time.
The game’s name also reflects our approach. A project that keeps moving upward and growing. Maybe slowly, but constantly. We are not running a sprint. We are running a marathon.
“No budget, no big team… so how?”
The lack of budget has a major impact. There is no question about that.
We had to rethink the way we approach development.
But for us, it does not mean we can’t finish the project. Why?
When a publisher or investor provides funding, we can hire people.
The advantage is obvious: we have a team of paid employees. Development moves much faster. We can also invest in marketing and build hype more easily.
There is also a major downside.
In this case, there’s usually a strict time limit. The game has to release before the money runs out, and it has to generate significant revenue to pay salaries. Sometimes this happens even if the game is not ready.
And if the launch fails, the money can eventually run out completely. The project may then be shut down before it ever has the chance to be properly finished.
In our case, we have not found external funding. So at this stage, we do not have a team of paid employees.
But there is an advantage to this too: our schedule is flexible. Yes, this can sound worrying because development may take longer. But there is another important advantage…
Even if our funds run out, we are already used to working on the project without being paid. Ascent Quest will not disappear simply because there is no more money in the bank.
If we do not have the advantages of external funding, why should we impose the disadvantages (time limit) on ourselves?
From our point of view, it would be a shame to rush the game out before it is ready. If Ascent Quest were purely a project made to generate money, the lack of initial funding would probably have meant the end of it.
But this is a passion project, made by people who simply want to create something they love, and who have the ability to do it. So for us, the lack of funding is not dramatic and funding may arrive later to scale up.
“High quality without a serious budget? The first release must still be far away!”
Not really.
Think of it like watching a TV series.
If there is only one season but it is great, you had a good time and you are excited to see the next seasons. You will probably come back for them even if they’re released a year after.
But if there are already five seasons available and you are bored after two episodes… what is the point of having five seasons?
The same idea applies to Ascent Quest.
Our first version may be smaller in terms of content than we originally hoped, simply because we do not have a full team. No, the game will not have 30 explorable regions or dozens of dungeons when it first enters Early Access.
But in terms of features and systems, we want to have a solid and fun foundation.
The missing content will then be added through free updates. And since we do not want it to require a subscription, you will always be able to come back from time to time, enjoy the new content, and not forced to pay any extra.
We are players too, and we know how frustrating waiting can be. That is why everyone will be able to access Ascent Quest once we reach Beta after purchasing the game. However, there is a minimum quality level we want to reach first. We want to make sure that our vision can already be clearly felt in the game, even if it is only in Beta.
The Beta is our way of giving you a playable game as early as possible.
But we are also taking a significant risk by giving access to a game that is still heavily in development, with bugs and features gaps, while knowing people will review it publicly on social media.
It is also worth remembering that a quality MMO can easily require 5 to 7 years of full-speed development with a complete team. Ascent Quest is currently in its 3rd year of full-speed development, with a very small team.
It may feel like the project has been in development for much longer because we started talking publicly about it very early, when it was at the playable prototype stage. So the first publicly playable version was still quite far away, while many other projects waited much longer before being presented – and that’s indeed a mistake we’ve made. We hoped to be able to enter the Early Access phase a lot sooner, but it heavily depended on our ability to increase team size, which never occurred.
We also know that a heavily hyped game that releases too early is quite often unfinished and can lose most of its community within a month. Unfortunately, we have seen this happen too many times with other games, especially in the MMO market.
We do not want to make that mistake. So we do not push hype-fuelled communication. For now, we prefer to stay a bit more quiet and focus most of our efforts on the game rather than on marketing.
“So where is development actually at?”
As I explained, our vision is focused on the long term.
That means we need to create many different tools and systems to support rich gameplay. They need to be robust, so we don’t have to recode them next year. So yep, these tools are the hidden part of the iceberg.
They represent more than half of the work on the project, but unfortunately, they are very difficult to show.
Many of you are especially waiting to see a big unedited gameplay showcase. For example, you may want to see a full group completing a dungeon, a major open-world event, or every step involved in crafting a legendary weapon. But before we can show these things, a huge amount of hidden work has to happen first.
Here is a concrete example: item merchants, which are already implemented in the Alpha.
Before we could create merchants, we first had to develop many other systems. Merchants depend on the item system and its data (item types, statistics, appearance, and so on), the inventory system with bag space and item stacking, transactions, money, and saving everything on your character.
It took around six months of development to make all of this stable.
Almost none of it could really be shown in a video while it was being developed.
Once all of this was developed, how long did it take to create the very first merchant that we could actually show in a video? One week.
And how long does it now take us to create a new merchant with its own inventory, dialogue, and interactive display of the items they sells? Around 10 minutes.
That is thanks to all the robust tools we built beforehand.
Many systems are already being developed and prepared to support the gameplay. But we cannot always show them.
To make development progress more transparent, we are about to add a new page to the website in the following days.
It will list all the planned features and show their current development status.
This should give you a much clearer idea of where we currently are and what we are planning next. Hard to be more transparent than that 🙂
“How can you financially launch the game and keep it running?”
Of course, an MMO costs money even after development.
Servers are required to keep the game running, and we need people for the helpdesk, game masters and maintenance. That is a serious expense directly related to the number of active players.
Even without investors or a publisher, we currently have enough funds to maintain a proper server infrastructure for quite some time. This comes partly from our own investments, but also thanks to your help through Kickstarter, Patreon and pre-orders.
We are also developing the project with server costs in mind.
This is one of the reasons why each in-game area is handled separately, even if we already have plans to try removing most of the loading screens. It makes the server infrastructure easier to manage and helps us control its cost.
Like the rest of the project, our approach to server costs is designed for the long term and to remain adaptable.
If only 100 players are connecting to the game every day, with our architecture, the servers would only cost a few dozen euros per month. Some of us would have no problem continuing development and personally pay for the servers out of our own pocket.
If, for any reason, we eventually become unable to keep the official servers online, releasing the server application is absolutely something we could consider.
The server application is developed entirely in-house. That does require extra development time, but one of the advantages is that we own all the rights required to redistribute it.
We hate it too when a game you bought becomes impossible to play simply because its creator says they can no longer afford to keep the servers online.
But what happens if the game becomes popular enough to require a much larger infrastructure?
Ascent Quest is not planned as a free-to-play game, for now. If the number of players increases, our available resources increase as well. That allows us to support the additional server costs. And in the longer term, this is also why we plan to introduce a cash shop (cosmetics and extra “quality of life” features only).
I hope this article helps you better understand the project and its current situation.
If you have any questions, feel free to join us on Discord. We try to answer as many questions as we can!
And in the meantime, remember that our videos introducing Patch 0.2 have started releasing (see previous news), with the next one planned for next week on our Youtube channel (if nothing goes wrong)!
Thank you for being here, and see you very soon!